Jackie Hodgson (Warwick) and Asher Flynn (Monash) have been awarded A$13,398 + £7,165 from the Monash-Warwick Alliance Seed Fund for the project: Access to Justice: A Comparative Analysis of cuts to the civil and criminal Legal Aid systems in England, Wales and Victoria, August 2013 – June 2014.

The project brings together Warwick colleagues Jackie Hodgson (PI) James Harrison, Andrew Williams and Nathalie Byrom (Co-Is) with Monash colleagues Asher Flynn (PI) Jude McCulloch, Bronwyn Naylor and Arie Freiberg (Co-Is). The study is a comparative analysis of the impact of cuts to the civil and criminal legal-aid systems operating in England, Wales and Victoria. This will be achieved through consultations with academic, legal and government/non-government stakeholders and the development of an online presence for external engagement. A conference will be held in Warwick on 19 March 2014, with the participation of Monash colleagues. Within the framework of access to justice, the conference will bring together leading academics and practitioners to consider (i) the changing face of the legal profession; (ii) the lawyer-client relationship; and (iii) the broader social consequences of the cuts. A second event will be held in Monash in early July 2014, with the participation of Warwick colleagues. The project will build international and comparative expertise with stakeholders, with a view to future funded research.

In October 2013 Jackie was elected to the governing Council of JUSTICE, the all-party law reform and human rights organisation.

JUSTICE (www.justice.org.uk ) works largely through policy-orientated research; interventions in court proceedings; education and training; briefings, lobbying and policy advice. It is the British section of the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ).

JUSTICE also has a Student Human Rights Network (www.justice.org.uk/shrn_home.php ), an online forum that aims to encourage interest in, and improve awareness of, human rights.

Jackie won in the Established Academics Category.

The award was made in recognition of the following:

Jackie’s criminal justice research has resulted in improvements to professional standards encouraging proactive defence lawyering and quality assessment requirements for the legal profession in England and Wales. She has influenced recent developments in EU criminal justice and through the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) has improved legal representation of those seeking to have their cases reviewed for appeal.

Specific non-academic engagement activities have included:

· Providing expert opinion to a Canadian court in a terrorism extradition case

· Feeding directly into EU policy through an impact study for the proposed EU legal aid directive on how to embed adversarial and competent legal assistance within the administration of legal aid

· A policy briefing with 30 lawyers and EU officials in Brussels (with the legal charity JUSTICE) to raise awareness of the importance of legal aid funding to mechanisms to ensure quality of legal advice to suspects in police custody in the EU

· The publication of ‘Inside Police Custody’ addressing procedural safeguards being legislated by the EU to be presented at a conference in Maastrict in May 2013 which will inform directly current EU measures on procedural safeguards

· Providing direct advice to inform the impact assessment for a measure on the right to be presumed innocent in order to develop policy options for a European measure and assess its impact financially and in terms of the enhancement of individual rights

The Times article

As academics engaged for many years in criminal justice research, we have grave concerns about the potentially devastating and irreversible consequences for access to justice if the government’s plans to cut criminal legal aid and introduce a system of tendering based on price alone are introduced.

The lawyer-client relationship is at the heart of effective legal representation, but the current proposals remove client choice, replace local services with mega-suppliers and treat advice as an impersonal commodity. Trust is especially important for the large number of vulnerable accused: lawyers who know their clients can pre-empt difficult issues, provide (sometimes unpalatable) advice which is more likely to be accepted, and help the courts run more effectively and efficiently.

Underpinned by independent research and evaluation, considerable resources have been devoted to measures that have enhanced the quality of legal advice and representation. All of this is now under threat and a small number of “suppliers” will receive a guaranteed share of the work however well or badly they represent their clients. With bids at least 17.5 per cent lower than existing average costs, the quality of legal representation will decline. Suppliers will have a strong financial imperative to do as little work as possible, and to persuade clients to plead guilty irrespective of the merits of their case.

The Minister has allowed only eight weeks of consultation on the proposals, with no intention to pilot the new contracts nor evaluate their effectiveness. The long-term effects will be devastating and the damage extremely hard to put right. Defendants, the police and the courts – and ultimately the taxpayer - will pay the price.

Professor Jacqueline Hodgson, Emeritus Professor Lee Bridges (University of Warwick)
Professor Ed Cape (University of the West of England)
Professor Ian Dennis, Professor Richard Moorhead (University College London)
Professor Nicola Lacey (University of Oxford)
Professor Tim Newburn, Emeritus Professor Michael Zander (London School of Economics)
Professor Andrew Sanders (University of Birmingham)

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Kimberley Brownlee

Kimberley was awarded a £37,000 Philip Leverhulme Prize. These prizes are designed to recognise and facilitate the work of outstanding young research scholars, who are making original and significant contributions to knowledge in their field with an international impact, and whose greatest achievements are expected to be still to come.

Kimberley Brownlee's research during her fellowship will focus on social human rights, and in particular the idea of a human right against social deprivation. The term ‘social deprivation’ refers to a persisting lack of minimally adequate opportunities for decent human contact and social inclusion. Social deprivation is a common experience in arenas of institutional segregation such as long-term medical quarantine and solitary confinement. It is also the most extreme variant of a more general, pervasive phenomenon of social isolation that includes people, many of whom are elderly or disabled, who are chronically, acutely lonely and unable to remedy their situation. This kind of deprivation is an important concern, particularly in western societies, given the individualistic bent of western culture, aging populations, and the ongoing use of isolating procedures in medicine, immigration, and criminal justice.

The book shows that civil disobedience is generally more defensible than private conscientious objection.

Part I explores the morality of conviction and conscience. Each of these concepts informs a distinct argument for civil disobedience. The conviction argument begins with the communicative principle of conscientiousness (CPC). According to the CPC, having a conscientious moral conviction means not just acting consistently with our beliefs and judging ourselves and others by a common moral standard. It also means not seeking to evade the consequences of our beliefs and being willing to communicate them to others. The conviction argument shows that, as a constrained, communicative practice, civil disobedience has a better claim than private objection does to the protections that liberal societies give to conscientious dissent. This view reverses the standard liberal picture which sees private 'conscientious' objection as a modest act of personal belief and civil disobedience as a strategic, undemocratic act whose costs are only sometimes worth bearing.

The conscience argument is narrower and shows that genuinely morally responsive civil disobedience honours the best of our moral responsibilities and is protected by a duty-based moral right of conscience.

Part II translates the conviction argument and conscience argument into two legal defences. The first is a demands-of-conviction defence. The second is a necessity defence. Both of these defences apply more readily to civil disobedience than to private disobedience. Part II also examines lawful punishment, showing that, even when punishment is justifiable, civil disobedients have a moral right not to be punished.

Oxford Legal Philosophy publishes the best new work in philosophically-oriented legal theory. It commissions and solicits monographs in all branches of the subject, including works on philosophical issues in all areas of public and private law, and in the national, transnational, and international realms; studies of the nature of law, legal institutions, and legal reasoning; treatments of problems in political morality as they bear on law; and explorations in the nature and development of legal philosophy itself. The series represents diverse traditions of thought but always with an emphasis on rigour and originality. It sets the standard in contemporary jurisprudence.

Together with colleagues in four other EU states, Professor Jackie Hodgson has been awarded a European Commission Action grant of €375,000 for the project: Protecting Young Suspects in Interrogations: A Study on Safeguards and Best Practice. The objective of this two year project is to strengthen the protection of young suspects during interrogation by the police in the EU. The project consists of a comparative empirical study of the different legal procedural safeguards in place in Belgium, England and Wales, Italy, Poland and the Netherlands. Based on these findings, this will be followed by professional training and recommendations for minimum EU rules and best practice.

The study follows on from Professor Hodgson’s current EU funded project, an empirical study of the procedural rights of suspects in police detention in the EU, leading to best practice recommendations.

Victor Tadros 'The Ends of Harm: The Moral Foundations of Criminal Law' (OUP, 2011)

Every modern democratic state imprisons thousands of offenders every year, depriving them of their liberty, causing them a great deal of psychological and sometimes physical harm. Relationships are destroyed, jobs are lost, the risk of the offender being harmed by other offenders is increased and all at great expense to the state. How can this brutal and costly enterprise be justified? Traditionally, philosophers answering this question have argued either that the punishment of wrongdoers is a good in itself (retributivism), or that it is a regrettable means to a valuable end, such as the deterrence of future wrongdoing, and thus justifiable on consequentialist grounds. This book offers a critical examination of those theories and advances a new argument for punishment's justification, calling it the 'duty view'. On this view, the permission to punish offenders is grounded in the duties that they incur in virtue of their wrongdoing. The most important duties that ground the justification of punishment are the duty to recognize that the offender has done wrong and the duty to protect others against wrongdoing. In the light of these duties the state has a permission to punish offenders to ensure that they recognize that what they have done is wrong, but also to protect others from crime. In contrast to other justifications of punishment grounded in deterrence, the duty view is developed in the light of a non-consequentialist moral theory: a theory which endorses constraints on the pursuit of the good. It is shown that it is normally wrong to harm a person as a means to pursue a greater good. However, there are exceptions to this principle in cases where the person harmed has an enforceable duty to pursue the good. The implications of this idea are explored both in the context of self-defence, and then in the context of punishment. Through the systematic exploration of the relationship between self-defence and punishment, the book makes significant progress in defending a plausible set of non-consequentialist moral principles that justify the punishment of wrongdoers, and marks a significant contribution to the philosophical literature on punishment.

Jackie Hodgson interviewed by France Arte TV, for the 'Le Blogeur' series, in a programme on criminal investigations in Europe, to be screened later this year.

More information to follow